How London beat New York to be the world's greatest city

For decades London and New York have duelled for the title of world’s greatest city. The rivalry raged even in the Seventies, when both towns were down on their luck — London still drab and scarred by war damage, New York so cash-strapped it not only went bankrupt but the lights literally went out in the blackout of 1977.

In the course of that contest the two cities have sought advantage on every possible measure. London usually lost out on the height of its buildings but gained on street-level hipness. Their restaurants used to be better, now ours have nudged ahead. When it came to theatrical vitality, Broadway and the West End have alternated the lead — and each other’s shows — with each season. Even the defections of star names from one metropolis to the other were counted on the ledger (they poached Martin Amis from us but we snaffled Madonna from them).

Still, if we’re honest, for most of those post-war years, New York was in front. Sure, we had the roughness and the edge: think of our city’s latter-day anthem, The Clash’s London Calling. But they had Sinatra singing of a city that never sleeps. We had the bitter cynicism of Amis’s London Fields, but they had Woody Allen’s love letter to Manhattan.

What gave NYC its structural advantage was not so much the city itself but the country it stood in. Put simply, New York could claim the number-one spot because the US sat at the top of the global pile. London was mighty and populous but it was chained to Britain, a small, damp island that, admittedly, once ruled the world but was now a power in decline.

Yet all that could be changing. Not because Britain is about to go up in the global rankings but because America might be slipping — losing its pre-eminent place to China.

Last week a global survey by the highly respected Pew organisation found that a majority of the world’s people now believe that the People’s Republic will either replace — or already has replaced — the US as the world’s leading power. In Britain, 59 per cent hold that view, with even higher numbers in France and Germany. You might suppose that that’s just the wishful thinking of gloating Europeans, glad to see the American behemoth taken down a peg or two. But even in America itself, nearly half the population thinks China is on course to overtake their country.

That’s the backdrop to my new novel, The Third Woman, which imagines an America adjusting to its new status as a global has-been. But such a scenario is hardly at the wilder shores of fantasy fiction. It rests in part on the evidence of China’s rise and rise, its economic performance which has seen double-digit growth figures even in the recent, post-crash years and which, by one index, last year saw the country become the world’s biggest economy.

But it also draws on a glum assessment of US standing. Some of that is about geopolitics: the sense that America’s writ no longer runs around the globe, that defiance of Washington no longer carries the heavy price it once did. Some of this is about its failure to transcend its perennial defects on guns and race. But it’s more basic than that. Americans see the nuts and bolts of their society — the roads, the bridges, the railway stations — covered in rust.

According to one estimate, 100,000 miles of US highways are in disrepair, while a quarter of America’s 148,000 bridges are deficient or obsolete. The network of interstate highways, America’s motorways, have long been regarded as unfit for purpose and starved of essential cash. A recent TV ad for the Audi A6 showed pot-holed roads and corroded bridges as the voiceover warned that the state of America’s highways was so bad, only a German car could get you through.

For the visiting Londoner, especially one of my generation who was raised to imagine New York as the city of gleaming skyscrapers, impossibly glamorous and infinitely more modern than creaking, aged London, all this becomes most visible with a trip to the city’s most-used railway terminus. Contrast Penn Station with, say, St Pancras. While the latter is an advertisement for a prosperous city — all wooden floors, elegant shops and classy restaurants — the former is a dump. With its narrow, fluorescent-lit hallways, shabby kiosks, makeshift hoardings and ubiquitous grime, Penn looks and feels like a UK station from the dark ages of British Rail.

Of course, Manhattan can point to the grandeur of Grand Central. And while New York is disfigured by Penn Station, we still suffer the distinctly unprepossessing Euston. But even though a revamp is in the works, the down-at-heel disrepair of Penn stands as a symbol of a city and country whose claim on the global top spot is no longer automatic. It’s only one measure of course, but the contrast is telling: China spends 12 per cent of its GDP on transport and infrastructure. In the US, the figure is a miserly 2.4 per cent.

If this is the way things are going, if the world I imagine in The Third Woman becomes reality, then London will suddenly find its old rival deprived of what used to be its sharpest weapon. In a China-dominated world, London will find it has some serious advantages, including a narrower time difference with Beijing and a shorter flying time (10 hours compared with 13).

Things might turn out differently. The US could find its ingenuity and capacity for self-transformation — witness last week’s Supreme Court vote for equal marriage — arrests its decline. Or maybe the decline will happen but New York will retain its magic all the same, the city flourishing even while the country around it struggles. There is a precedent for such a story — and it’s called London.

The Third Woman by Jonathan Freedland is published by HarperCollins, £12.99